Business View Magazine | September 2019

207 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 LANCASTER , CAL I FORNI A designs and monitoring. This was one of the most expansive solar community programs ever undertaken and included clients such as the Sierra Toyota Car Dealership, the Lancaster School District, Desert Christian School, the Eastside School District, the Lancaster Business Park, and Lancaster Baptist Church. In addition, five City facilities — Lancaster Municipal Stadium, City Hall, and the Lancaster Performing Arts Center, among other sites — are now powered with clean, non-polluting solar energy in a 1.45 megawatt project, which is projected to save the city an estimated $6 million over 15 years. Clear Channel Stadium, home of the Lancaster JetHawks, is the first minor league baseball stadium in the country to go green. Its solar system offsets close to 100 percent of its energy use and saved its owners nearly $50,000 in the first year of operation alone. Lancaster is also a Community Choice Aggregator (CCA), an alternative to the investor-owned utility energy supply system, in which local entities aggregate the buying power of individual customers within a defined jurisdiction in order to secure alternative energy supply contracts. The CCA chooses the power generation source on behalf of the consumers, and by aggregating purchasing power, it is able to create large contracts with generators – something individual buyers may be unable to do. The main goals of CCAs have been to either lower costs for consumers or to allow consumers greater control of their energy mix, mainly by offering “greener” generation portfolios than local utilities. Once established, CCAs become the default service provider for the power mix delivered to customers, while the incumbent utility continues to own and maintain the transmission and distribution infrastructure, metering, and billing. “We’re a Community Choice Aggregator, but we’re also a department of the city, so we run a little differently than a lot of the other Community Choice Aggregators in the state in that we serve